Recently a lot of cloud hosting platforms started to appear. But most of them
are either bound to a particular language or technology or have quite a limited
Perl support. It is always a joy to see a new hosting company that supports my
favorite language. And now we have even three alternatives!

Here is a simple application that we will try to deploy (complete source code
examples are available on github, don't copy-n-paste it ;):

It just checks if today is my birthday and otherwise tells me how many seconds
I should wait :)

dotCloud

First I tried http://dotcloud.com. You have to install a special
Python-driven helper application that allows you to control your services and to
deploy your applications. Actually any PSGI compliant application can be
pushed.

More examples

ActiveState Stackato

Then I tried http://www.activestate.com/cloud platform. This is more like a
personal cloud service. You get a virtual machine image with pre-setup
components. An additional helper application is also available, but you can
actually use a ssh client and run commands on the server. There are some tweaks
with the network setup but they are well described on the documentation page.

More examples

Fluxflex

Recently I found http://www.fluxflex.com. Maybe it is not as powerful as
previous solutions, but it doesn't require you to install any additional
programs for pushing your apps, integrates with http://github.com and is very
very very cheap. A good choice for simple and medium websites.

What am I using?

Unfortunately none of them. My recent interests lie in real-time web
applications that require WebSocket proxying. Available platforms are built on
Nginx+uWSGI or Apache+FastCGI technologies and are not suitable without
additional patching, hacking etc.

I hope this will be changed soon.

POD ERRORS

Hey! The above document had some coding errors, which are explained below: